Category: Culture

What Writers Think About

ideas

One of the cool things about calling yourself a writer is you get to do all kinds of things that everybody else calls bone-ass lazy.  Stuff like spending hours drinking coffee, taking long strolls through the Internet and staring off into space.  Wordy Wordsworth called it, “… powerful feelings: … recollected in tranquility” or something like that.  This “work” is essential for writers to hone their craft.  The serious upside is you get to discover all kinds of interesting facts, and you have time to come up with even more interesting conclusions.  Here are just a few things I’ve been pondering for the last couple of months.

There’s a town in Canada called Smithers — which means the people who live there are Smithereens.

On average, the Dutch are the tallest people in the world — even though a lot of them are standing below sea level.

Apparently, a huge bunch of people born between 1977 and 1983 are sick and tired of being lumped in with those terminally malcontent millennials.  They have decided to perform a generational Brexit (Genexit?) and want to be referred to as Xennials.  I can’t say I blame them.

In the future, people will look at their electronic devices and think “What a stupid icon for a telephone.”

Despite everybody and her friend claiming they broke the Internet – you can’t.  The truth is the Internet is no longer vulnerable to human attack: there are just too many servers scattered across the planet.  However, before you go all SkyNet/Terminator, 99.99% of all electronic devices are just dumb machines used for storage.

Humans first walked on the moon 50 years ago in 1969.  That was 2 years before women got to vote nationally in Switzerland and 8 years before France quit using the guillotine for executions.  Weird, huh?

One of the earliest and most persistent symptoms of lead poisoning is irritability, so it’s interesting that statistics show violent crime (aside from armed robbery) has been steadily decreasing since lead was banned from automobile fuel in the late 1980s.  Coincidence?  Maybe. . .

For several years, universities have been adding puppies to their “safe spaces” to combat student stress and exam anxiety.  Whatever!  The weird thing is nobody is willing to talk about what happens to the puppies when they’re no longer puppies.  Creepy!

Over 100 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.  Wow!  And, according to the last time they kept records (several years ago) it would take you approximately 93,000 years to watch everything YouTube has to offer.  That is a lot of avoidance behaviour!

In the last 10 years, restaurant revenues, movie theatre revenues and department stores revenues have all declined — whereas the revenues of home delivery companies like Uber Eats, GrubHub, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have all dramatically increased.  If this trend continues, eventually millennials will never have a reason to leave their apartments.  And this is a bad thing?

Andy Warhol was wrong.  In the future, everybody will have 15 minutes of privacy.

And finally:

I think it’s absolutely hilarious that a generation raised on South Park and Family Guy spend so much time being eagerly offended by everything.  Irony is not dead.

I Refuse

no

The world is large and it’s full of wonder, but it’s also an obstacle course of nasty.  This is the stuff that we know is unfair, stuff we know is a scam, stuff that insults our intelligence and our integrity.  In general, we just have to put up with this crap– or spend our entire lives cultivating an apoplectic ulcer.  However, there is one way to survive without being totally pissed off all the time: that’s to stop, take three deep breaths and refuse to participate.  Here are just a few things I refuse to do.  (Some of them are more serious than others.)

I refuse to use Gillette products – A while ago, the multinational boys at Gillette made a video that called me (and every other man) a bad friend, a bad father/brother/uncle, a bad role model, a bad mentor, generally a bad person, certainly a sexist and quite possibly a … anyway … you get the idea.  Their only purpose, as far as I can see, was to cash in on trending “toxic masculinity.”  So be it.  Well, I’ve been called a lot of names over the years, but I’ve never paid anybody for the privilege – and I’m certainly not going to start now.

I refuse to wear short pants – I know it’s uber-fashionable, but in ten years, we’re all going to laugh ourselves stupid at the photographs.  Here’s the deal.  Unless you’re a swimmer, a diver, a runner, a pole vaulter or an ice hockey player (think about it!) there is no logical reason for a grown man in the northern hemisphere to wear shorts to work.  Just sayin’!

I refuse to Tweet – My only mission in life is to communicate, and Twitter is the poster child of communication in the 21st century.  So what’s the problem?  Quite simply, Twitter is the meanest, nastiest, most judgemental, disrespectful, petty form of communication since Grog the Caveman grunted obscenities at the Neanderthals down the road.  History is going to look at our time and conclude most of our problems came from the horrible way we talked to each other – and I’m not willing to be part of that.

I refuse to eat liver – I have no philosophical quarrel with liver, but I ain’t going to eat it.  (This is my mother’s fault.)

I refuse to give money to charity — Sounds hard-hearted and it is, but in my defence, I’ve donated tons of clothing, furniture and food over the years.  I’ve recorded radio programs for the blind, cooked pancake breakfasts, swept floors, washed dishes, picked up garbage, sold raffle tickets and taught public speaking in a federal prison – all gratis.  When I get to the Gates of Valhalla, I’m not going to have anything to be ashamed of in the good works department.  My problem with giving cold hard cash to charity is there’s always a middleman somewhere, and no one is ever willing to tell me how much he’s taking off the top.

And finally

I refuse to be lectured by teenagers – I’ve always worked on the premise that the ideas of young people are fresh.  They look at the world with an untrained eye, which gives them a lot of latitude — and that’s a good thing.  However, I’m not interested in being berated for my many failures by someone whose biggest accomplishment so far is mastering puberty.  The notion that kids bring just as much to the table as the experts who’ve studied the problem for years is ludicrous.  Here’s how it works: if your kitchen is flooded, who are you going to call to fix the water pipes – some child fresh out of middle school or a professional plumber?  The choice is yours, but I’m going with the plumber.

Enlightenment To Be Demolished

enlightenment

It came as no surprise today when it was announced on Twitter that The Enlightenment (sometimes called The Age of Reason) will be demolished.  This grand old building stood at the crossroads of our society for over 3 centuries, and is was a beautiful example of Neo-Classical Intellectual architecture.  Its inner courtyard housed the Garden of Knowledge, and over the years, many prominent philosophers (influencers) passed through its Halls of Logic.  At one time, the main entrance was dominated by a statue of Descartes (a dead white guy) but that was removed several years ago.  A radical sect of old people have formed a Facebook group to preserve the foyer’s marble floor with the motto Sapere Aude (dead white language) which, strangely, is actually etched in stone. They have been labelled “divisive” by anybody who really matters, and their efforts will probably fail.  The only decision left is what to do with The Enlightenment’s vast collection of books (really long Tweets, written on paper.)  One spokesperson said, “We thought about burning them, but that would send the wrong message.  So we’re considering just locking them away until everybody forgets about them.”

The idea of The Enlightenment is totally old, and was first proposed by ancient Greek thinkers — notably Socrates, Plato and Aristotle — (more dead white guys) but it took over a millennium of turmoil before it was finally built in the late 17th century.  Over the years, the building was renovated many times but always maintained itself as an institution that nurtured knowledge through logical thought and civilized discourse — although those ideals were never universally accepted.  In fact, throughout its history, The Enlightenment has been continually condemned by tyrants and dictators who demanded it be torn down.  Fortunately, it always managed to survive when free-thinking people stood between it and the demagogue’s wrecking ball.  However, times change, and in the 21st century, the shift in popular culture has left The Enlightenment abandoned and derelict for a generation.  Its broken windows and peeling paint are considered an eyesore by image-conscious contemporaries, but even its harshest critics admit the building is still structurally sound.  Another spokesperson commented, “We’ve been systematically dismantling The Enlightenment for years, but the damn thing just won’t fall down.  It’s making too many people uncomfortable.  It has to go.”

After The Enlightenment is demolished, there are plans to convert the site into a Celebrity Theme Park to promote awareness for a rotating series of trending social injustice issues.  The park will also feature a safe space (with puppies) for university students and areas where celebrities will be flown in to berate ordinary people on a variety of topics.

Despite once being heralded as a bastion against ignorance, the general feeling these days is The Enlightenment’s time is over.  Here are a just a few comments from social media.

“They used to do logic there or something, right?  We don’t need that anymore.  We just get on Twitter and call each other names.  That works.”

“Just because you read those book things, that doesn’t mean you’re smart.  My post-graduate degree is in Alternative Knowledge.”

“Leonardo DiCaprio has like millions of Instagram followers.  How many does The Enlightenment have?  Like none!”

“Good riddance!  People shouldn’t have to conform to Eurocentric rules of conclusion-based thinking.”

In a related story, the apartment building, Freedom of Speech, has been rezoned, and all the tenants have been given a 30-day eviction notice to vacate the premises.